Album: Trash Palace

Positions, Tape Modern

Sexual desire has always been one of the motors of rock'n'roll, though rarely as explicitly as in these hymns to carnal pleasure created by Dimitri Tikovoi, the Parisian techno-synthesist. Tikovoi traffics in a similar kind of electro-sexual twitch and throb as the Eighties German duo Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF), drawing on techno's pounding energy as a sonic representation of sexual activity; the result is a sort of continental cousin to Goldfrapp's Black Cherry, but more down and dirty. Using guest vocalists such as Brian Molko, Asia Argento, Lian Warrington and John Cale, Tikovoi rummages through the sleazier fringes of sexuality, from the S&M of "Sex on the Beach" and "Bad Girl" ("I'm taking full control/ So you just sell your soul") to the internet/chatline Lolita luring her prey in "Mary". In places, it gets pretty tasteless - I could have done without Molko singing about selling "genital suck juice" to celebrity lesbians in "The Metric System" - but there are compensations in Molko and Argento's tender remake of "Je t'aime... moi non plus", in Cale's sinister narration of an erotic encounter in "The Insult", and particularly in "Your Sweet Love", where restrained, almost courtly synth figures underscore the ickle-girly tones of Cranes' Alison Shaw as she sings of sexual anticipation.